Adblock Plus comes to Samsung smartphones

One of the most popular browser add-ons of all time, the AdBlock plus, is now available for Samsung phones, the company said in a press release.

The Samsung Browser will get the add-on with the update to Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Users with Android 5 Lollipop can also download it from the Google Play Store immediately.

The browser extension can either block all ads, or just filter out the annoying ones. There’s no detailed explanation what these annoying ads are, but I’m guessing those are the pop-up ones, and generally those that ‘ruin the mobile browsing experience’, as the popular term goes.

The Acceptable Ads program, which filters some ads while leaving others, will be turned on by default on all devices with the add-on installed, the company said in a press release.

“Adblock Plus is very excited to continue our momentum in the mobile space by solidifying a working relationship with Samsung that allows us to handle content blocking on any Samsung device,” said Till Faida, co-founder of Adblock Plus. “We are excited that Samsung’s mobile product offering is now including content blocking and are happy that Samsung users can find us in the Google Play Store to assist them with their ad blocking.”

Adblock Plus is by far the most popular browser add-on, with more than 500 million downloads worldwide. It was in the centre of many controversies, as the industry claims add-ons such as this one are hurting the web which relies on advertising to keep the content free.

UPDATE: Richard Lack, Director of Sales, EMEA at Gigya commented “For a typical European publisher, ad blockers are now used by 15 to 25 per cent of all visitors. Despite there being technologies available which allow publishers to overcome such technology, this doesn’t solve anything. The real issue is that in the last five years the marketplace has been overwhelmed with cheap, untargeted and invasive programmatic advertising. Ad blockers are a natural grass roots response to this issue because users are not being able to enjoy the content they are looking for.

“2016 will be the year we see a huge consolidation in the programmatic ad space, especially those platform vendors or ad networks which rely on generally inaccurate third party data. It will also be the year when publishers begin to shore up their revenues against the cost per mille (CPM) erosion brought about by loss of control of their ad inventories to programmatic networks.

"Content publishers must tackle this problem, thinking about ad relevancy and user experience on their mobile and web properties."